Digital Commons Network^™

Open Versus Laparoscopic Hiatal Hernia Repair., Terrence M. Fullum, Tolulope A. Oyetunji, Gezzer Ortega, Daniel D. Tran, Ian M. Woods, Olusola Obayomi-Davies, Orighomisan Pessu, Stephanie R. Downing, Edward E. Cornwell

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

BACKGROUND: The literature reports the efficacy of the laparoscopic approach to paraesophageal hiatal hernia repair. However, its adoption as the preferred surgical approach and the risks associated with paraesophageal hiatal hernia repair have not been reviewed in a large database.

METHOD: The Nationwide Inpatient Sample dataset was queried from 1998 to 2005 for patients who underwent repair of a complicated (the entire stomach moves into the chest cavity) versus uncomplicated (only the upper part of the stomach protrudes into the chest) paraesophageal hiatal hernia via the laparoscopic, open abdominal, or open thoracic approach. A multivariate analysis was performed controlling for …

Proto-Property In Literary And Artistic Works: Sixteenth-Century Papal Printing Privileges, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This Study endeavors to reconstruct the Vatican’s precursor system of copyright, and the author’s place in it, inferred from examination of over five hundred privileges and petitions and related documents – almost all unpublished – in the Vatican Secret Archives. The typical account of the precopyright world of printing privileges, particularly in Venice, France and England, portrays a system primarily designed to promote investment in the material and labor of producing and disseminating books; protecting or rewarding authorship was at most an ancillary objective.

The sixteenth-century Papal privileges found in the Archives, however, prompt some rethinking of that story because …

First Things First: Juvenile Justice Reform In Historical Context, David S. Tanenhaus

Scholarly Works

In my remarks today, I will explain how conceptions of children's rights have been used to shape the American juvenile justice system's development. First, I will argue that we should take a long view of this history. Next, I will focus on three specific eras of twentieth-century reform. Finally, I will conclude with a call for more research on the prosecutor's role in administering juvenile justice. This historical perspective, I believe, can help us to answer the challenging question of what children's rights should be.

Wag The Dog: Using Incidental Intellectual Property Rights To Block Parallel Imports, Mary Lafrance

Scholarly Works

Federal law grants owners of intellectual property rights different degrees of control over parallel imports depending on the nature of their exclusive rights. While trademark owners enjoy strong control over unauthorized imports bearing their marks, their protection is less comprehensive than that granted to owners of copyrights and patents. To broaden their rights, some trademark owners have incorporated copyrighted material into their products or packaging, enabling them to block otherwise lawful imports in contravention of the policies underlying trademark law. A 2013 Supreme Court decision has significantly narrowed the importation ban of copyright law, but there may be pressure to …

When Fear Rules In Law’S Place: Pseudonymous Litigation As A Response To Systematic Intimidation, Benjamin P. Edwards

Scholarly Works

When reprisals and intimidation make certain types of cases too risky for most plaintiffs to file, courts should preserve access to justice by allowing more plaintiffs to proceed pseudonymously. As it stands, courts may be deciding requests to proceed under a pseudonym without understanding the full scope of possible retaliation risks, including that past retaliation may work continuing harm through the stress created by fear.

Unusually heightened retaliation risks may be best exemplified by the nasty reprisals befalling plaintiffs in separation of church and state cases. Although multiple books addressed the issue in the mid-90s, the violent trend has continued …

Nfib V. Sebelius: Proportionality In The Exercise Of Congressional Power, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

With its opinion on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the U.S. Supreme Court sparked much discussion regarding the implications of the case for other federal statutes. In particular, scholars have debated the significance of the Court's recognition of an anticoercion limit to the Spending Clause power.

When it recognized an anticoercion limit for the ACA's Medicaid expansion, the Court left considerable uncertainty as to the parameters of that limit. This essay sketches out one valuable and very plausible interpretation of the Court's new anticoercion principle. It also indicates how this new principle can address a long-standing problem …

The Fda’S Graphic Tobacco Warning And The First Amendment, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Deactivating Implanted Cardiac Devices: Euthanasia Or The Withdrawal Of Treatment?, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Concussion And Football: Failures To Respond By The Nfl And The Medical Profession, David Orentlicher

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Ballot Design As Fail-Safe: An Ounce Of Rotation Is Worth A Pound Of Litigation, Mary Beth Beazley

Scholarly Works

For generations, some candidates have argued that first-listed candidates gain ‘‘extra’’ votes due to primacy effect, recommending ballot rotation to solve the problem. These votes, however, are generally intentional votes, accurately cast, and rotation is controversial. This article argues that rotation is appropriate because it mitigates the electoral impact of not only primacy effect, but also of two categories of miscast votes. First, rotation mitigates the impact of proximity-mistake votes, which can occur even on well-designed ballots when voters mis-vote for a candidate in proximity to their chosen candidate. Second, rotation mitigates the impact of mis-votes caused by flawed ballot …

An Introduction To Climate Change Liability Litigation And A View To The Future, Michael B. Gerrard, Joseph A. Macdougald

Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the advancement of climate change litigation. It explores two approaches to climate change litigation; the first is to use the federal regulatory apparatus and the second is to use the tort system. The article explores key questions in climate change litigation such as, who is responsible for deciding the appropriate level of harmful emissions? How should courts handle the long tail effects of climate change? What are the proper forums to litigate in? And, what is the role of the federal government in climate change litigation?

We Are Always Already Imprisoned: Hyper-Incarceration And Black Male Identity Performance, Frank Rudy Cooper

Scholarly Works

In this Essay, Professor Frank Rudy Cooper recenters the experiences of men of color, particularly those of black men, in light of Reagan's War on Drugs and recent scholarship illustrating the over-representation of men of color in prison for petty drug use. The mainstream's depiction of black men as always already imprisoned disciplines us into the never-finished quest to prove we are a "Good Black Man," rather than a "Bad Black Man." In order to propose greater empathy for black men's imprisonment, this article proceeds in the following manner. In Part I, Professor Cooper sets the stage for considering the …

Live Free Or Regulate: Considering A, B And Their Dispute Resolution Clause Regarding Blackacre, Jean R. Sternlight

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Leaky Leviathan: Why The Government Condemns And Condones Unlawful Disclosures Of Information, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

The United States government leaks like a sieve. Presidents denounce the constant flow of classified information to the media from unauthorized, anonymous sources. National security professionals decry the consequences. And yet the laws against leaking are almost never enforced. Throughout U.S. history, roughly a dozen criminal cases have been brought against suspected leakers. There is a dramatic disconnect between the way our laws and our leaders condemn leaking in the abstract and the way they condone it in practice.

This Article challenges the standard account of that disconnect, which emphasizes the difficulties of apprehending and prosecuting offenders, and advances an …

Wag The Dog: Using Incidental Intellectual Property Rights To Block Parallel Imports, Mary Lafrance

Scholarly Works

Federal law grants owners of intellectual property rights different degrees of control over parallel imports depending on the nature of their exclusive rights. While trademark owners enjoy strong control over unauthorized imports bearing their marks, their protection is less comprehensive than that granted to owners of copyrights and patents. To broaden their rights, some trademark owners have incorporated copyrighted material into their products or packaging, enabling them to block otherwise lawful imports in contravention of the policies underlying trademark law. A 2013 Supreme Court decision has significantly narrowed the importation ban of copyright law, but there may be pressure to …

Constraints On Private Benefits Of Control: Ex Ante Control Mechanisms Versus Ex Post Transaction Review, Ronald J. Gilson, Alan Schwartz

Faculty Scholarship

We ask how to regulate pecuniary private benefit consumption. These benefits can compensate controlling shareholders for monitoring managers and investing effort in implementing projects. Controlling shareholders may consume excessive benefits, however. We argue (a) ex post judicial review of controlled transactions dominates ex ante restrictions on the controlled structures: the latter eliminate efficiencies along with abuses of the controlled company form; (b) controlling shareholders should be permitted to contract with investors over private benefit levels. Both work with better courts. Hence, we recommend creating a European-level corporate court, whose jurisdiction parties can invoke by contract.

Tips For Capturing 2014 Federal Court Clerkships, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Now is a perfect moment for analyzing 2014 clerkships because law students across the country have completed their productive summer employment and are poised to commence their final year. Below are ideas which could help aspirants secure those coveted positions that start during next August.

Passive-Aggressive Executive Power, Corinna Barrett Lain

Law Faculty Publications

My contribution to the 2013 Constitutional Law Schmooze poses a question about the downside of executive power, at least in the enforcement context. If executive power to enforce the law presupposes the duty to use it, what happens when the executive branch would rather not? Perhaps reframing the question will help. What do the death penalty, driving violations, drugs, deportation, and the Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”) have in common, besides the letter “d”? The answer is passive-aggressive executive power, and in the brief discussion that follows, I use these five factual contexts to illustrate five variations of what I …

An Integrative, Multilevel, And Transdisciplinary Research Approach To Challenges Of Work, Family, And Health, Jeremy W. Bray, Erin L. Kelly, Leslie B. Hammer, David M. Almeida, James W. Dearing, Rosalind B. King, Orfeu Buxton

Psychology Faculty Publications and Presentations

Recognizing a need for rigorous, experimental research to support the efforts of workplaces and policymakers in improving the health and wellbeing of employees and their families, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention formed the Work, Family & Health Network (WFHN). The WFHN is implementing an innovative multisite study with a rigorous experimental design (adaptive randomization, control groups), comprehensive multilevel measures, a novel and theoretically based intervention targeting the psychosocial work environment, and translational activities. This paper describes challenges and benefits of designing a multilevel and transdisciplinary research network that includes an effectiveness study …

Seqnls: Nuclear Localization Signal Prediction Based On Frequent Pattern Mining And Linear Motif Scoring, J.-R. Lin, Jianjun Hu

Faculty Publications

Nuclear localization signals (NLSs) are stretches of residues in proteins mediating their importing into the nucleus. NLSs are known to have diverse patterns, of which only a limited number are covered by currently known NLS motifs. Here we propose a sequential pattern mining algorithm SeqNLS to effectively identify potential NLS patterns without being constrained by the limitation of current knowledge of NLSs. The extracted frequent sequential patterns are used to predict NLS candidates which are then filtered by a linear motif-scoring scheme based on predicted sequence disorder and by the relatively local conservation (IRLC) based masking.

The experiment results on …

Google Books: Game, Set, But Not Match, James Gibson

Law Faculty Publications

It’s back: Google Books, our favorite topic in this Intellectual Property Viewpoints series. Google Books is the project through which Google has brought its search capability to the text of more than 20 millions books (with the number still growing). To do so, Google must scan the book and convert the scan to readable text. And there’s the problem: Scanning is copying, and copying raises the question of whether the massive project is a massive violation of the copyrights in all those books. Thus the Authors Guild v. Google class action brought by authors and publishers against Google in a …

Determining Faculty Perception Of Ownership Rights Of Online Course Content In Higher Education, Carrie J. White

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

With the ever increasing growth in the number of online courses offered by institutions of higher education, determining ownership of the content of these courses is becoming an important consideration. Many institutions have intellectual property policies in place that are either vague, outdated or non-existent when determining copyright ownership to online courses. Faculty members who are creating these courses are many times investing their own intellect into the course content, which would traditionally invoke copyright ownership over that content. However, courses being offered to students in an online format have created some confusion as to ownership rights over those courses. …

"We Do The Same Work As The Men Did": The Development Of Working-Class Feminism In The Glass And Pottery Industries Of West Virginia, 1930-1970, Virginia C. Young

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Union women fought sex discrimination and opened the workplace for all women through their use of 1963's Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Scholars often attribute their success to well-known EEOC sex discrimination cases, such as those against the steel industry and Southern Bell. Yet much of the fight against sex discrimination in the workplace came not from "famous" EEOC cases but, rather, from lesser-known incidents in which union women filed shop-floor grievances to challenge sex discrimination. Moreover, many union women used grounds other than the new federal anti-discrimination laws to make their …

Living Up To Our Ideals: What Race Means In Higher Education Now, Frank H. Wu

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Can The Blind Lead The Blind? Rethinking Equal Protection Jurisprudence Through An Empirical Examination Of Blind People's Understanding Of Race, Osagie K. Obasogie

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Geochemistry Of Mine Pool Discharges In The Pittsburgh Coal Basin, Timothy A. Denicola

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Seventy-two mine water discharges from flooded underground mines of the Pittsburgh coal bed were sampled for chemistry during 2012. Statistical techniques including correlation, principal component analysis (PCA), and cluster analysis (CA) were utilized to evaluate geochemical relationships. The distributions of most solute concentrations are non-parametric. Strong correlations were observed between constituents of pyrite and carbonate dissolution (Fe, SO 4, Ca, Mg) as well as Na, Sr, and K. Several waters with high scores on PC1 are moderately saline with average concentrations of Na (1199 mg/L), Cl (350 mg/L), Br (1.69 mg/L), and Sr (4.13 mg/L). Waters with highly negative scores …

From Sinners To Saints: Emerging Agency In American Women's Novels Before The Civil War, Amy Howard Green

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This study investigates the ways in which the narrative of salvation contributed to the development of female selfhood in American women's novels before the Civil War. Over time, protagonists of some of the most popular of these novels were transformed from victims of seduction (as in Charlotte Temple or The Coquette) into self-reliant agents of virtue (as in The Wide, Wide World or The Lamplighter). Such a depiction suggests that a similar shift in readers' imaginations of their own selfhood was also taking place, and it paralleled changes in the genre conventions of novels that have been traditionally identified as …

Effectiveness Of A Theory Based Comprehensive Sexual Education Program At A Baltimore City High School, Darlene Hinds

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Background Sexual activity among adolescents can have lifelong consequences including teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey (YRBSS), reported 13.8% of high school students grades 9-12 admitted to having intercourse with four or more people and 34.2% report being sexually active (CDC, 2010b). Baltimore City has disproportionately high rates related to teen pregnancy, chlamydia and gonorrhea when compared to national statistics. In 2006, the rate of teen births among girls ages 15-19 in Baltimore City was 66.4 per 1,000, compared to Maryland's teen birth rate of 34.4 per 1,000 (Maryland Department of Health and Mental …

Thrombelastography Parameters Versus Classical Coagulation Profile In Trauma Patients: A Retrospective Study, Abdulraouf Y. Lamoshi

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The West Virginia University Guide to the Preparation of Masters Theses Abdulraouf Y. Lamoshi Thrombelastography Parameters versus Classical Coagulation Profile in Trauma Patients: a Retrospective Study Background: Thrombelastography (TEGTM, Hemoscope, Niles, IL) is increasingly utilized. As TEG depicts overall coagulation it may be more comprehensive and capable to detect any coagulation abnormalities in comparison to classical coagulation tests (CCT: PT, PTT, INR, platelets). Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is thought to contribute to coagulopathy. The primary aim was to compare TEG parameters of TBI vs. Non-TBI patients. The secondary aim was to identify TEG vs. CCT parameters associated with outcome (mortality, …

An Examination Of Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis In Rural Youth, Molly R. Matthews-Ewald

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Weight gain among United States' children, adolescents and adults has become a pandemic problem, and is of great public health concern, given the increased risk for myriad chronic health problems and associated medical expenditures. It is well established that increased energy expenditure through physical activity may reduce weight and improve health. However, the predominant focus of this research has been with moderate to vigorous levels of activity (MVPA). A growing body of evidence suggests that activity levels below this (i.e., light levels), may also be beneficial. Specific to light activity, a recent area of focus has been on non-exercise activity …